All the best Space wallpapers

These five sites have all the best space wallpapers you can download for free. Check them out now.

This week at Softonic HQ we’re concentrating on bringing you fantastic wallpapers for your Windows PC or Apple Mac, and also all the best places to find them.  If you’re looking for cool desktop backgrounds including scenes and images from your favorite video games, the biggest sporting events around the world, the latest movies, and hip minimalist pictures we have you covered. Today though, we’re covering wallpapers and backgrounds from space. We don’t mean they’ve come from space; we mean desktop wallpapers of all things space related. We’ve got to say, some of these are incredible!

With these Space wallpapers we’re going to do things a little differently. Rather than highlighting particular images we like such as famous nebulas, supernovas, black holes, spiral galaxies, and planets like Saturn and Jupiter; we’re going to concentrate on where to find them all. Let’s go.

HD and 4K Space Wallpapers

Wallpaper Access

As you’ve probably guessed from the name of this website, it doesn’t specialize in space-related matters. Clearly, what Wallpaper Access specializes in are wallpapers and backgrounds. That doesn’t mean though, that the space images you find here won’t be special. On the contrary, Wallpaper Access is a great place to go find a huge collection of ultra-high-resolution space images that you can use as the background on your PC or Mac. In particular, the 4K Space Wallpapers collection is fantastic, with 69 breathtaking scenes both of outer space and views from outer space looking back to earth.

Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Telescope is one of the most iconic human machines ever built. Thanks to its earth orbiting platform, the Hubble has been able to capture some of the most incredible scenes of space the human race has ever laid eyes on. If you have a particular image of outer space stuck in your mind, chances are it was taken by the Hubble. By going to straight to the source of those space images here, you’ll be able to get your hands on space images with ridiculously epic titles like A rose made of galaxiesThe pillars of creation, and Galactic wreckage. What’s also great about the Hubble website is that it gives you free access to the full size original image meaning you won’t have to compromise on quality, if you don’t want to, and you’ll also get interesting explanations about all the images written by teams that captured them. If you’re looking for HD space wallpapers of the Milky Way, Orion’s Belt, our Solar System and beyond; this is the place to start your search.

Unsplash

Unsplash might just be the coolest stock photography library on the internet. It has thousands, if not millions of fantastic images, which have all been uploaded by the artist or photographer behind them. What’s even better about Unsplash is that all the images are available for free. As you’d expect from such a site, Unsplash has a fantastic section on space images that has many great space scenes and vistas that would be perfect as your wallpaper.

Space.com

Space.com describes itself as, “the premier source of space exploration, innovation, and astronomy news, chronicling (and celebrating) humanity’s ongoing expansion across the final frontier.”  Sounds cool, doesn’t it! As you’d rightly imagine, all that makes space.com the perfect place to find some truly awe-inspiring space-related backgrounds. Also, just like with at the Hubble website you’ll not just get the images to use as your background, you’ll also learn about what is going in the images and how they were taken. If you’re looking for something a little deeper than merely an image that looks cool, this is the place to go.

NASA

Our final source of amazing space-related wallpapers is NASA. As you’d expect from the most famous space agency on the planet, NASA has a huge library of space images. These include photos captured by telescopes on earth and in orbit, photos of cool equipment such as radio telescopes, mission mockup images like those of the famous Curiosity Rover, historic mission photos, and much much more. If you want backgrounds with space shuttles and International Space Station missions, this is the site you’re looking for.

Out of all the sites we’ve brought you today, the NASA website is our favorite because on top of offering you some fantastic images that will make great backgrounds, being a fantastic place to learn about space, and doing all of that for free; many of the images on the NASA site will make you feel emotional as you’ll recognize them. You might know who the person is in the image, what the shot is of, or even just feel an emotional attachment for the robot you’re looking at. NASA is a huge part of our global culture these days and that really gives the desktop wallpapers you’ll find here a lot more weight.

Wrapping up

We’ve shown you five great places to source all the best space wallpapers available on the web. If you’re a big space fan, you’ll definitely find the wallpaper you’re looking for on one of the five sites above. In fact, you’ll find a lot more than just backgrounds on three of the sites meaning it all depends just how deep you want to go. You might log on to the Hubble or NASA websites simply looking for a new background for your PC and emerge hours later having ended up researching anything from the composition of moon rocks to the age of the oldest and youngest galaxies. That’s just it with space though, the possibilities are endless.

3 billionaires racing to build the future of space travel

Space travel is making huge strides because of three wealthy visionaries.

How billionaires are influencing private space travel

It’s been a great year for space travel.

Early this year, after President Trump signed the Omnibus Bill, NASA miraculously received $20.7 billion, the highest amount since the 2009 stimulus package. The Trump Administration’s proposed 2018 budget was seen by many as a “War on Science,” but when the bill was actually voted on most of NASA’s budgets were increased or remained uncut, shocking the scientific community. This is surprising as Republican senators have historically been opposed to climate and earth-based research, some of which is carried out by NASA.

After a few decades of budget cuts and stagnation, NASA’s revitalized budget has caused much celebration. However, for many years it looked like NASA had been all but abandoned by the federal government. This drought led various entrepreneurs (mostly billionaires who established their fortune in other industries) to create their own private space companies.

The goal of these private space companies is to greatly reduce the cost of space travel, making it viable and realistic to achieve lofty goals such as colonizing the moon and Mars. This new private space industry, dubbed NewSpace, is high-profile, brutally competitive, and utterly fascinating.

Here are some of the top players in NewSpace right now:

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is easily the most high-profile player in NewSpace. In 2002, the PayPal co-founder used his enormous wealth to fund SpaceX, of which he is the lead designer and CEO. Though his eccentricities and hasty Twitter fingers have often led him in hot water, Musk has nonetheless become the face of NewSpace. Musk famously has extremely high ambitions for SpaceX, with plans for the colonization of Mars within his lifetime.

SpaceX has had a number of high-profile rocket launches, with its most famous being the Falcon series of rockets. Notably, SpaceX is currently working on its BFR (Big Falcon Rocket or Big F***ing Rocket) series of spacecraft, which will allow rockets to be reused and relanded automatically instead of being discarded. This would dramatically reduce costs for space flight missions, a stated goal of Musk and SpaceX.

SpaceX has scored a recent string of victories, including a successful Falcon launch for an Argentine satellite, establishing contracts with the U.S. government to send astronauts up to the International Space Station, and his collaboration with Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa for the #dearmoon artistic lunar tourism mission.

Jeff Bezos

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is currently the richest person in the world, with a net worth of over $150 billion. He formed the private space company Blue Origin in 2000 as a response to what he saw as government negligence to space travel. The company has a troubled history of fabled launches, though fortunately for it Bezos has more than enough money to keep it afloat.

Blue Origin is notably both less flamboyant and more secretive than SpaceX. Despite this, the two companies share a heated rivalry categorized by legal disputes and Twitter flame wars. Like its rival, Blue Origin has been slowly gaining more valuable government contracts and security clearances. Blue Origin’s current main goal is to create affordable sub-orbital space tourism. Tickets are going on sale next year for the low, low price of $300,000. In the future, Bezos has said that establishing a permanent Moon colony is Blue Origin’s ultimate goal.

Yuri Millner

Russian dot-com billionaire Yuri Millner launched Breakthrough Initiatives in 2015. While he plays a part in NewSpace, BI’s goals are decidedly different from both SpaceX and Blue Origin. Instead of looking to reduce the cost of space travel, Breakthrough Initiative’s goal is to find and make contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life.

Breakthrough Initiative is comprised of three main departments: Breakthrough Listen, Breakthrough Message, and Breakthrough Starshot. Breakthrough Listen utilizes various observatories to listen for “radio and laser signals from the nearest million stars, the nearest 100 galaxies, and the plane and center of the Milky Way.” Over $100 million is being invested in Listen over the next 10 years.

Breakthrough Message offers a million dollar prize for people to submit messages that would be transmitted to alien civilizations. Whichever messages win, there would be an international panel that votes on whether the messages are both ethical and properly represent humanity. Lastly, Breakthrough Starshot is a project that would utilize light sails traveling at 20% the speed of light in order to reach Alpha Centauri, a journey that would take 20 years of travel plus an additional 4 years to transmit a message back to Earth.

What do you think about all of the people and companies mentioned? Do you think they’ll be able to accomplish their goals? Let us know!

 

Watch Elon Musk’s new rocket light up the California sky

Watch the Falcon 9 launch light up the California sky

Last Sunday night, Californians were dazzled by the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket lighting up the sky. The spectacular launch can be viewed below:

 

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Video recap of last night’s launch and landing

A post shared by SpaceX (@spacex) on Oct 8, 2018 at 12:37pm PDT

The launch marked the first time SpaceX successfully landed a rocket on the west coast as opposed to a drone at sea. SpaceX has completed ground landings before, but only on the east coast, as they previously did not have permission to build the gigantic landing pads that they needed in the west.

Additionally, past ground launches attempted to land the rocket at a target a few miles away from the launch site. For Sunday’s launch, the rocket was successfully landed at a target that was only a quarter mile (400 meters) away from the launch site.

The purpose of the launch was to send up the SAOCOM 1A for the Argentinan space program. The radar on the satellite tracks the activity of natural disasters, allowing the government to notify people and keep them safe. The satellite also can analyze the moisture content of soil (all the way from space!) in order to help farmers maximize their crop yields.

The continued success of SpaceX’s rocket launches has caused the valuation of the company to climb, even in the face of continued controversy regarding its eccentric CEO Elon Musk. Valued at $28 billion, SpaceX is currently the third most valuable American startup after Uber and Airbnb. Looking towards the future, the most high profile upcoming SpaceX endeavor is ferrying American astronauts to the International Space Station. This mission has been delayed repeatedly, but is currently expected to happen in January.

LocalS were warned ahead of time of sonic booms and bright lights as authorities assured them that neither an alien invasion or nuclear annihilation was coming.